by Robert Bloch
I glanced to my right, down the side of the bar, but I couldn’t see Art Hughes. My drink came, I disposed of it, ordered another. A foursome came in and sat down on the vacant stools to my left. They craned their necks to see the television set. Some drama was on, but nobody could hope to hear it above the juke-box jangle, which was probably just as well.
I picked up my drink and moved all the way to the right, way down to the corner. And there I sat, for all of thirty seconds, before I felt the hand on my shoulder.
“Art!” I said.
“So you remembered.” He grinned at me, shyly. “I wasn’t sure you would.”
Apparently I had seen him last night, then, and made a date. But I wanted to know more.
“Sit down,” I invited. “What’ll it be?”
“Ale will do.” Art, in addition to being a Gershwin fan, was an ale drinker and a pipe smoker. Which was all right with me, as long as he didn’t take up ice fishing and expect me to go along.
The ale came, and I ordered another shot for myself to keep him company. We sat back and relaxed a bit. At least I did; I’d always found it simple to relax with Art around. He was the easy-going type. Tonight, though, I sensed a difference, or thought I did. He kept making rings on the bar with the wet bottom of his glass.
“Hard day?” I asked, just for something to say.
“The usual. And you?” He put a lot into the question, or was I just imagining things?
“Nothing special.”
“Nothing?”
He really was after something. I downed my shot. “No. Why should there be?”
“No reason.” He finished his ale, glanced at his watch as I signaled to the bartender. “Hey, wait,” he said. “I’ve got to be running along.”
“Time for a quick one, though,” I assured him, and wondered what gave here. “Got a date lined up or something?”
“Well, no. But I’ve got to clean the place up, and—”
I didn’t bother to listen to the rest of it. Art was always a poor liar; not that he lied very much that I could recall. But why was he in such a hurry to leave? I didn’t think it was a girl; Art never ran around with anyone but the ghost of Gershwin. Those pipe-smoking ale drinkers are all alike. Marie had always tried to fix up a date for Art, and he’d always backed down. I could remember that easily enough.
So it wasn’t a girl, and yet he wanted to leave. Why? And whatever the reason, if he wanted to leave, why had he bothered to show up in the first place?
I decided on the direct approach. “Look,” I said. “Was I very bad last night?”
That made him blink for a moment. “Bad? No, Tom, you weren’t bad. Of course, you got pretty excited, you said some pretty wild things for a guy who hadn’t been drinking—but then, you must have had a rugged session with her.”
I was right. I’d seen Kit, then come over here and found Art.
“You can say that again,” I told him. “Matter of fact, I guess I was so excited I don’t even remember half of what I was talking about.”
“Is that the real reason?” His lips asked the question, but he kept his eyes on his glass.
“Sure. What else would there be?”
“Well, you know what you told me. Or don’t you remember?” Suddenly he looked up at me without blinking. “Say, you didn’t have one of them last night, too, while you were telling me about it?”
“One of what?”
“The blackouts. The amnesia, the spells.”
I hesitated, then nodded. “That’s right,” I admitted. “As long as you know that much, you might as well know the rest.”
Art drank, paused, drank again. He set his glass down. “I’m sorry, Tom,” he said. “But as long as you’re leveling with me, I’ll level with you. I’ve known about those blackouts for a long, long time.”
“How long? Since it happened? I mean, was it in the papers?” Funny I’d never thought of it being in the papers; then again, it must have been. There must have been a lot of stuff about me and Marie. Only I’d cracked and they hadn’t let me look at the papers—and when I finally got out, I didn’t want to. Sure, that was it: he’d read it in the papers. He and a million others.
“No, Tom,” he told me. “Even before that. Marie talked to me about it.”
“I see.” I grinned at him and put my hand on his shoulder. “And you never let on. That was nice of you, boy—didn’t want to embarrass me.”
He drew back, almost but not quite imperceptibly. “That’s all right. Here, let me buy you one—and then I’ll really have to cut and run.”
Cut and run. I didn’t like that phrase. Marie had been cut and the blood had run.
When the drinks came, I said, “Tell me something, Art. Last night, did I do a lot of talking about—Marie?”
Again he turned away. He was pouring his drink and his hand slipped a little. I watched the puddle form at the side of his glass. I had plenty of time to watch it before he replied, and then his voice was so low I could scarcely hear it over the juke box.
“No, it wasn’t Marie,” he said. “It was this girl of yours. This Kit.”
“I talked about Kit, eh? And I was pretty upset?”
“Yes, Tom. You don’t remember, do you?”
“Not a moment. Not a moment until this morning, around eight-thirty. Then I snapped right out of it, just like that.” I snapped my fingers.
“Tom.” He was almost mumbling now. “Tom, you’re all right now, aren’t you? I mean you can remember what we’re talking about.”
“Of course I’m all right. Good Lord, I’m not crazy or anything like that. You know I’ve been given a clean bill of health. It’s just these spells—”
“Sure, Tom. But I wanted to be certain you could remember. Because I’ve got a piece of advice for you. Go see a doctor, Tom. See one soon. Tomorrow.”
“Now look here,” I said. “It can’t be that bad. So I had a little blackout last night, and I talked a little wild because Kit quarreled with me. Is that anything to make a production number out of?”
“No. But I wish you’d see a doctor. Just for a checkup.” He stood up. “Now I’ve got to shove.”
I stood up, too. “Oh, just like that, is it?” I said. “You’ve got to shove. Three, almost four years I’ve known you, and you’re shoving. No ‘see you tomorrow,’ or ‘see you next week,’ or even ‘see you around.’ Just that you’ve got to shove. What’s the matter, am I poison or something?”
“You know better than that, Tom.”
“It’s getting so that I’m not sure what I know any more,” I murmured. “I thought I was sure of myself, but that was years ago. Now I get blackouts. Then I thought I was sure of Kit, and she walks out on me. All through everything, though, I’ve always been sure of you. The way you stuck by me when Marie had those spells, the way we used to get together night after night . . . Why, even when I was in the hospital they told me you’d come around and asked if I needed any money or anything. Art, you’ve been my best friend. Don’t I deserve a better deal than this ‘got to shove’ routine?”
A novelty card salesman once pinned a sign on my store wall, next to the safe. It read THE MORE YOU EXPLAIN, THE MORE I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT. I thought of that sign now, watching Art Hughes’ face as I talked.
The more I said, the more he edged away. Was I just imagining things, or was he really scared? Was Art afraid of me?
“All right,” I sighed. “I give up. Go shove.”
He started to walk away, then stopped. Kit’s routine. “How about it, Tom?” he asked. “You’ll see a doctor?”
“Maybe,” I countered. “If you’ll answer me just one question.”
“Go ahead.”
“You don’t like being around me very much after last night. That’s obvious, and you needn’t try to deny it. But even so, you came in here hoping to see me. Why?”
He shrugged. “I just had to find out.”
“Find out what?”
“Find out how everything went today.
”
“But why?”
“Because of what you said last night. After you talked about Marie, and the way she died, you began talking about this Kit, and your quarrel.”
“Go on,” I said in a flat voice, “I want to hear what I said.”
“Well, it was only talk. I know that now. And if you’d just go and see a doctor—”
“What did I say? What did I say about Kit?”
Art Hughes took a deep breath. “You said that if Kit ever tried to walk out on you now, you’d kill her.”
FOUR
I suppose I sat there at the bar for a long, long time after Art Hughes went away. I sat there thinking about a lot of things—first about him, then about Kit, then about Marie. But mostly about Marie. About Marie, and what had happened after she died.
I’d come to standing there, standing over her with the scissors in my hand. She was dead. I didn’t need to feel her pulse or anything like that—not after taking one look at her throat. So I called the cops, and they asked me a lot of questions, and then the photographers shot off a lot of flash-bulbs in my eyes, and they took me down to headquarters and booked me.
I don’t blame them. Even today, I don’t blame them at all for what they did. They find a woman with her throat cut, and her husband calls up and tells them about it. Then when they ask him where he was and what he was doing, he says he can’t remember. His prints are on the scissors and the neighbors say his wife was always crying. He talks about amnesia and blackouts, and when they get him down in front of the D.A. he can’t even answer simple questions.
So he’s probably trying to fake it for an insanity plea. So they talk tougher, and they say they’ll throw the book at him. So he cries and goes all to pieces and doesn’t even ask for a lawyer. And the next morning, he’s in a daze: can’t even remember his own name, or so he says.
Cops don’t care for that kind of reaction. I can understand that now. I couldn’t then; I couldn’t understand anything. For a while there I guess I didn’t even remember Marie was dead. The first thing I do recall was that I was crying her name when I really snapped out of it.
By this time I was already in Veteran’s Hospital and Doc Greene was taking care of me.
Doc Greene was the boy I had to thank for everything. He’d spotted my picture and name in the paper the morning after it all happened. He’d hopped over to headquarters, backed up my story, got the coroner to look for Marie’s prints on the scissors, too. He practically took over the case: he pointed out the suicide angle, the melancholia. He figured out just how you’d have to hold the scissors to make such incisions; it added up, pretty much, to the fact that I or anyone else would have to be a contortionist to do the job. It wasn’t impossible, but it was very difficult.
And then, to clinch it all, he managed to trace back part of my route. I’d been in a tavern way over on the other side of town, from two-thirty until three-thirty. I must have walked home, because there was no bus running where I could have made a connection and been home before five. And as close as the coroner could figure out, Marie had died any time between midnight and four in the morning.
Besides, he knew my record; he’d taken care of me over there, in Korea. He made quite a witness at the inquest. I just sat there, still in a daze.
The important thing was, Doc Greene had cleared me. He stampeded them into a suicide verdict. And it would have been very hard for me to have made it home by four in the morning, very difficult for me to do the job.
But not impossible. And suicide—
That’s what I kept telling him, even after a lot of sessions, even after there was no relapse, no need for restraint. “Suicide,” I’d say, over and over again. “It just doesn’t add up, Doc. Marie loved me. She wouldn’t kill herself when she loved me.”
Then was the time he told me about melancholia. Involutional melancholia. It sounded possible, and yet . . .
So when I was almost ready to be discharged, he told me the rest. They’d found out something during the autopsy.
“She was going to have a baby,” he said. And pregnant women, in her mental condition, frequently are impelled to self-destruction. “I’m sorry, Tom, but it all adds up.”
It all added up. But what did it add up to? Maybe it made me a double murderer. I didn’t know.
I do know that Doc Greene helped me a lot after I got out. He helped me when I decided to leave town and needed a loan from the VA to open my store. He even wrote to me, for a while, until he was transferred back to the West Coast. I know he helped me as much as one man can ever help another.
But I didn’t know for sure how Marie had died and even now, a year and a half after I got out of the hospital, I still couldn’t be sure.
I wasn’t sure about that, or about Kit, or about Art. I wasn’t sure about anything, except that I couldn’t stand this being alone much longer. Sitting alone here in the corner of the bar, nursing my fourth—fifth?—drink.
It’s never good to sit alone at the end of the bar. I had a theory about this, too; a very simple theory which I’d never dared put to the test.
I believe that if a man walked into a strange tavern, some ordinary neighborhood place, every night at eight p.m. and ordered one drink—sat down at the end of the bar—drank it, then walked out—and if he came back the next night and the next and did the same thing, without saying a word to anyone except to give his order—I believe if a man did this for two weeks straight, he’d be killed.
It wouldn’t be four nights before some of the regular customers would be asking the bartender who the creep was, after he walked out. It wouldn’t be six nights before they’d be openly murmuring while he was still sitting there, minding his own business. By the tenth night they’d have him figured out as a queer, a Communist, a lunatic. By the twelfth, somebody would go up to him and try to get him into a conversation. If he didn’t respond, by the fourteenth night the neighborhood bully and loudmouth would gather his cronies, wait for the man to come in, and then walk over and ask him what the hell he was doing in here anyway, coming sneaking around like that. If the man answered, the bully would hit him. If the man didn’t answer, the bully would hit him. And the sight of blood would be enough to bring on the second blow. They’d all wade in, and they’d kill him.
No, it’s not good to sit alone. Not good at all, and not safe. If you sit alone, you might be killed. Or perhaps you might be the one who’d be contemplating killing.
Marie had died. And I’d threatened to murder Kit. So I moved away from the end of the bar, into the crowd.
I slid onto a stool in the center of the mob, in the center of the bibulous, babbling Babel. And it was a Babel they were building, getting higher and higher with every drink.
It was hard to distinguish voices in this crowd. It was harder still, once a voice was isolated, to comprehend words and phrases. But the noise itself was comforting, it was human and familiar.
Then one voice became familiar, and its words were familiar too.
“. . . awright, so gimme twenty bucks for the album. Twenny bucks for Chrissake, this here dealer said it was worth maybe two hunnert . . .”
Mr. Calgary. Sure enough, there he was, as big as life. Bigger than life, seen this close up. Because he was only two stools away from me, down the bar. Separating us was the little redhead. I looked at her as she looked at Calgary.
She was tugging him by the sleeve now, saying, “Come on, Joe. Come on, now, cut it out. He doesn’t want to buy anything. Joe, come on, you’re embarrassing me!”
I suppose, on occasion, the rhino birds tug at their rhinoceros—and with just about the same results.
Joe Calgary clutched the album in one hand. The other hand was locked on the oldest bartender’s tie. “Twenny bucks is all,” he said. “You gotcha self a real deal, buddy. If it wasn’t I had a bad day with the nags and all, I would’n even of let you smell of it. But I wanna show Trixie here a little action, so how’s about it? Twenny bucks . . .”
“Shut up,
Joe, will you shut up and let the guy alone?”
“. . . worth easy two hunnert. Come on, fork over, be wise for a change . . .”
“Take your hands off me. I told you I don’t want to buy any album.”
“Then how’s for lendin’ me the twenny? Until tomorrow night, see? Take the goddamn album for secur’ty. That’s it, you lend me twenny now, huh?”
“Let go of me!”
“Joe, lay off the guy—”
“Oh, want to get smart, huh? Awright, you got it comin’, buddy.”
Then everything went into presto vivace. The bartender yanked himself free, signaling desperately to his companions behind the bar. The little redhead banged at Joe Calgary’s thick neck with her handbag. Joe Calgary reached out and hit the bartender in the side of the face with the Gibbons album. It represented over a thousand dollars in profit, it weighed more than six pounds, and it drew blood.
The other two bartenders came up on the run, but I was closer. Close enough to swing Joe Calgary around and clout my fist into his face. I didn’t aim for anything in particular. With a face that big to hit, you didn’t have to aim.
I landed solidly, solidly enough to hurt my knuckles. Joe Calgary just grunted, spat, and looked at me. I saw the light of dawning recognition, followed by another light. It kindled like a sudden glare, and then Joe Calgary struck back.
He didn’t strike with his fist. Instead, his hand went away for a moment, disappeared under his coat. When it came out, I saw the fist. It was curled around the handle of a knife.
The knife ripped down. I ducked and my stool clattered to the floor. Coming up, I hit him in the stomach. He wheezed, and then I heard the song of the knife. I tried to get out of the way, but it wasn’t necessary. Something cracked above my head, the knife clattered to the floor beside me, and then I stood up.
One of the other bartenders had hit Joe Calgary over the wrist with a sap. Nothing had broken, apparently, but a sap can hurt even a Joe Calgary when properly applied.